Empowering Advisors To Help Clients Live Fearlessly With Dan Zitting

Dan Zitting is the CEO of Nitrogen, a platform that empowers advisors by creating more engaging, confidence-building client conversations. He is a longtime SaaS entrepreneur and operator with a background in building software in governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). Before Nitrogen, Dan founded Workpapers.com and later led Galvanize through significant growth, culminating in its $1 billion acquisition by Diligent. At Nitrogen, he focuses on using modern technology to help advisors deliver more personalized guidance so clients can invest and live fearlessly.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:13] Dan Zitting discusses Nitrogen’s mission to help people invest and live fearlessly

• [3:35] Why financial advisors need tools to personalize advice at scale

• [5:28] How Nitrogen supports emotional awareness in client conversations

• [8:52] Dan highlights how Nitrogen facilitates the shift from saving mindset to spending with confidence

• [10:45] Rebranding from Riskalyze to Nitrogen and expanding beyond risk tolerance

• [15:57] Rebuilding the platform with an AI-first approach

• [17:38] Using AI to ingest brokerage statements and build portfolios quickly

• [24:05] Launching the tax product and generating insights from a client's tax return
  

In this episode…

Financial advice can feel overwhelming and emotional, especially when clients are unsure whether they’re making the right decisions or if their long-term plans are truly secure. Advisors, in turn, often struggle to translate complex topics like risk, taxes, and income planning into conversations that feel clear, personalized, and confidence-building. How can advisors strengthen client trust while scaling those high-impact moments across a growing book of business?

Dan Zitting, a SaaS executive and enterprise software leader with deep expertise in governance, risk, and compliance platforms, shares how advisors can elevate client outcomes through better engagement and communication. He emphasizes meeting clients where they are emotionally, using structured talk tracks to prepare for meaningful conversations, and presenting recommendations in a professional, visual format that clients can actually absorb. Dan also highlights how modern AI can reduce prep time by automating data ingestion, uncovering hidden planning insights from documents like brokerage statements and tax returns, and helping advisors focus more on guidance and trust rather than manual workflow.

In this episode of The Customer Wins podcast, Richard Walker interviews Dan Zitting, CEO of Nitrogen, about helping advisors create fearless client moments through better engagement and AI-powered tools. Dan discusses rebranding beyond risk tolerance, building an AI-first platform, and using tax insights to deepen planning conversations.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik!

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn

• Dan Zitting on LinkedIn

• Nitrogen

• "How Brand Evangelism Drives Growth in Fintech With Diana Cabrices" on The Customer Wins

• "How Salesforce Is Transforming Financial Services With Michelle Feinstein" on The Customer Wins

• "Outsmarting Cybercriminals in Finance With Brian Edelman" on The Customer Wins

• "Growth Tips for Wealth Management Firms With Aaron Klein of Nitrogen" on The Customer Wins

• Aaron Klein on LinkedIn

Quotable Moments:

• “Our mission is to empower the world to invest and live fearlessly.”

• “We invented something called the risk number. It’s probably what we’re most well known for.”

• “We believe that we are a big lift to the editing layer of the advisor.”

• “All I have to do is load in my client’s tax return.”

• “We should be a customer-led company. We should be a market-led company.”

  
  

Action Steps:

1. Build client meetings around “fearless moments”: Structuring conversations around risk, tax, and income planning creates clarity and confidence that keeps clients engaged and loyal.

2. Package advice in a professional, visual format: Turning complex recommendations into polished, easy-to-digest presentations builds trust and improves client understanding.

3. Prepare talk tracks before every meeting: Entering conversations with tailored discussion points leads to deeper dialogue and more meaningful outcomes for clients.

4. Use AI to remove manual prep work: Automating tasks like data intake frees advisors to focus on guidance and relationship-building rather than busywork.

5. Stay customer-led when deciding what to build or improve: Validating ideas through real feedback prevents wasted effort and ensures solutions align with actual client needs.

   
   

Sponsor for this episode...

This is brought to you by Quik!

At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.

Using our FormXtract API, you can submit your completed forms and get clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate.

Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.

Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.

Richard Walker: 00:16

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Diana Consulting, Michelle Feinstein of Salesforce, and Brian Edelman of FCI. Today I get to speak with Dan Zitting, CEO of Nitrogen Wealth. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.

Instead, get Quik! using Quik!. You'll be able to generate completed forms and get that clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right. Today's guest is Dan Zitting, CEO of Nitrogen, a company focused on helping financial advisors grow through better client engagement.

Dan's background is in enterprise software as a service businesses, particularly in governance, risk, and compliance software. He started his first company, workpacers.com. Wait a minute. We're in paperwork. Hold on.

Which was acquired in 2011. He then led Galvanize, which grew into a leading GRC software company serving thousands of customers around the world and was ultimately acquired in a $1 billion deal. Dan spent much of his career building software platforms that help companies make better decisions and scale their impact. Dan, welcome to The Customer Wins.

Dan Zitting: 01:50

Thanks so much, Rich. It's really exciting to be here.

Richard Walker: 01:53

I'm excited to talk to you and hear what's going on. For those who haven't heard my podcast before, I just love talking to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they build and deliver great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. So, Dan, I want to understand your business a lot better. How does your company help people?

Dan Zitting: 02:13

Yeah, so we help two really two primary groups of people, one, our actual customers, our financial advisors, US-based financial advisors, and we help them in turn help their clients. And so we say our mission is to empower the world to invest and live fearlessly. And we do that by providing a set of tools to financial advisors that help them elevate or create these, what we like to call, catalyst client moments. So we do that by helping a financial advisor have a really impactful conversation around a couple of different topics, risk their investment choices, tax, etc., and do it in a way where it really makes the advisor look professional to in turn deliver great-looking, super professional advice to their clients to help them live fearlessly.

Richard Walker: 03:09

I love that, I love that concept of living fearlessly, because finance has so many facets to the emotion of our lives, right? Do I have enough? Do I? Am I worthy of it? All the things that go with it.

I want to take this to the financial advisor side, though, because as a consumer and I've been a financial advisor, but as a consumer, you might think, oh, they know everything. They're perfect at their job. Why do they need your solution? Why don't they just have these abilities up front?

Dan Zitting: 03:35

Well, for a couple of reasons. I think there's, you know, first and foremost, there's an awful lot of different types of clients out there in different types of situations. And I think it's hard for any one person, no matter how superhuman they are, to thoroughly research and provide a great deal of in-depth, personalized advice across all of these different situations. If you're going to manage a book that's actually big enough to run, you know, to have a thriving and successful business number one. So but number two.

An advisor may be amazing at having a conversation with the client about what they ought to do or creating spreadsheets. What we do is put that advice in a spectacular package that really makes the moment have impact. So I think it's about both of those things. It's it's both about helping the advisor get easier access to the right kind of advice at the right time with a really deep level of personalization, but also put it in, put it in a package or, you know, especially now as people are more and more expecting a digital experience, a digital, you know, a digital touchpoint of some kind that helps the client see the professionalism of visual representation of what the advice being explained is, so they can really internalize it and have that sort of moment that helps them grow fearless.

Richard Walker: 05:08

Yeah, you guys produce beautiful presentations, right? I mean, nobody just wants to read a book and read all the words. Otherwise, we all would have read those books. I'm curious about something else. I've never really contemplated this until you started saying this.

Do you think your product helps advisors grow their emotional intelligence with their clients?

Dan Zitting: 05:28

That's a really good question. You know, I think it I authentically think it does. Because what again, what we're trying to do is elevate that moment. So the more customized more personalization is probably how we talk about it more often. But it really is.

You know, we invented something called the wrist number. It's probably what we're most well known for going back into our history. And that's really what the risk number does is say is say we all know how to talk about what markets are going to do in the long term, but how is this client feeling today or feeling in the short term? And how is the advice best going to land with them based on that sentiment or that where they are today? So we know what the long term answer may be, but how do we meet the client where they are today based on, as you described it, their emotional state or otherwise?

Richard Walker: 06:28

Yeah. I just have to imagine because your product is creating a level of automation to get the information, package it in a way that's consumable. But second, by making it consumable, you're having both parties. The advisor and the client talk about it in meaningful ways. So I have to imagine that opens up the door for the emotion to actually be seen, and then for the advisor to feel it more and be part of it more versus just sterile. Here's your numbers type of thing.

Dan Zitting: 06:55

Well it does. That's right. And so there's the numbers themselves which are great for creating a conversation. But what our software actually also does is sort of say, you know, based on our history and having worked with tens of thousands of advisors over the years will prepare for you a sort of a a a talk track or a set of talking points for consideration that say, hey, you know, based on what we know about your client and, you know, hundreds of thousands of other clients like them that we've seen over the years, these may be things that are worth talking about. And depending on who that client is, it may be about the short term state of the market.

It may have nothing to do with the markets. It may have a lot more to do with tax. It may have to do with it, may have to do with exactly the opposite. You've actually done really great. And you should be talking with them about their income planning and how to spend some of your hard work.

And so by, you know, creating maybe creating that, you know, that that talk track or that that list of points will help, you know, an an advisor who has a busy day every day and may only have a certain amount of time to prepare for this meeting to, you know, help them open up their brain a little bit to here's some other areas that that might be where the where the client moment gets elevated today based on based on who this client is and what's going on with them.

Richard Walker: 08:18

You know, I've been enjoying short clips of Dave Ramsey talking to people who call into his show, and the one I heard this morning was somebody calling in like, okay, I learned how to save all my money, and now I don't know how to spend my money. And he's like, yeah, you've exercised only one muscle. You got to learn the other side, which is a fascinating thing. We're also focused on how to build wealth. But finally you get to a point where you can use that wealth.

And I used to have a client who wouldn't spend anything, and we told them, here's how you make new decisions the next time you take a flight. It's my first class. Next time you buy a car, it's the top end. Like, don't worry about these things.

Dan Zitting: 08:52

It's ironic. I've certainly known people, friends and family who are the same way. It's like my own dad is probably a little bit this way. He owned a small business, and ran his whole life. 40 years, finally ends up retired, and he's a super tight guy.

Never had a financial advisor. And it's not like he has tons and tons of money. But I wish he had a financial advisor just to have that conversation with them about hey, you did a pretty good job raising two kids. They're fine. Why don't you take advantage of what you built and you know where our software would come in and say, hey, look at based on this kind of income plan, even if 2000 or in his case, if 1986 happens again, it's not going to matter.

You still need to go out and enjoy yourself a little bit, or at least a little bit more than you're willing to on your own.

Richard Walker: 09:46

You know, I shouldn't speak so much for my mom, but she did exactly that. A year ago, she finally got an adviser, and she went from this. I don't know if I have enough for an advisor like you're set like you. You've done it. She now has this confidence.

And she doesn't just shop at thrift stores anymore, which has been her favorite hobby forever. Now she's like, well, I deserve that. I can buy that now.

Dan Zitting: 10:07

Yeah. Your mom became fearless. So that's what we are, that's what we are, that's what we aspire to.

Richard Walker: 10:14

So now I'm curious if her advisor used your product or not. Let's talk a little bit about your product, but I want to talk about it from a different perspective. So I had the pleasure of having Aaron Klein on the show the month Riskalyze became Nitrogen. So I want to know from your perspective, you've taken over that role, his role. How has rebranding the company affected perception and product affected what you're doing?

Because I know you guys had intention for doing the rebrand, but what is reality and how has it felt to you guys and your customers?

Dan Zitting: 10:45

Yeah, it's a really good question. So as you mentioned, Aaron Klein is my predecessor and the founder CEO of the business. And so I inherited that rebrand, when I met the company, it was already called Nitrogen. But I'd been through a rebrand once in my past life. And what I saw here was a little bit different and a little bit unexpected.

Frankly, I think what the what the original intention of the rebrand was, we were formerly known as Riskalyze, and what people thought we did was we took a risk questionnaire from the client that you could file in your CRM so that you had evidence of of, you know, having done due diligence with the client and that and that sort of thing. The reality is that the system does that, but it's not really the value. The value actually comes from the conversation, the elevated moment with the client and the fearless client being one that is either a more fearless prospect who actually comes on board with you or a client that continues to live fearlessly and thus and thus stays with the business. And we had a whole bunch of other tools that helped encourage that. So the principle of the rebrand was to become Nitrogen.

Nitrogen being a term that's associated with it. You know, it's an element that's used in fertilizer, helps plants grow. It's an element that's used in making explosives, explosive growth, all of these sorts of things. And the idea was that we were going to associate ourselves with rather than just being a risk tolerance tool, being a growth platform. Now, all of that is background.

What I would say is it took us some time and probably some missteps on our part to really begin to take any advantage of that. Our clients, what we did was very descriptive of what they knew us for. It was very clear to their clients, when they asked them to take a risk questionnaire, that it would be this company that they do it with, etc.. And I would say, you know, we tried to do a lot of things at once, and we probably hadn't yet delivered on the full promise of what Nitrogen was going to be, this expanded set of tools for growth. At the same time, you know, obviously, a rebrand is disruptive to our customers and disruptive to the way they work.

So I would openly tell you that that rebrand wasn't super broad, not that our customer base wasn't super excited about that right out of the gate. And it took us some time to get past that and, and sort of repeating and proving and reiterating that value proposition before I think it really started to do us some good. And so all that to say, you know, here we are now, it's three years later, almost four years later, something to that, something to that effect. Since we've done that three years later and I'd say, you know, we're having a big customer conference coming up. We're talking about it as almost kind of the, the re coming out party of, of Nitrogen because we have recently launched new products that are around creating fearless moments around tax, creating fearless moments around income planning, not just risk tolerance.

And so the platform really, really does offer that value proposition today. And we're still, though, three years later, reminding customers what it means to be Nitrogen and just even that they need a growth tool, a sales enablement tool, as opposed to, you know, the things we were more traditionally known for needing like a CRM.

Richard Walker: 14:29

It's ironic, right, because Riskalyze is the perfect niche name. It says what it does, it got the point across, it grew accordingly, and then it outgrew its capabilities. So you had to rebrand it.

Dan Zitting: 14:41

Yeah.

Richard Walker: 14:42

Premium or plus or enterprise. It had to be something new, like you said, right?

Dan Zitting: 14:46

It's it's. That's right. I think that, you know, there's a challenge in convincing people or even making folks aware that a platform like this can be helpful. And we I really do believe we had to go all the way to the top of that brand association to kind of explode the conversation enough for us to have space for the customer to hear that message, and then at the same time, hear us recommit to the promise that what you love us for we're still the best, or we think we're the best in the industry at it. That won't change.

We're just going to make sure that you can have just as impactful a moment around these other topics, income tax, etc., as you historically have had around risk.

Richard Walker: 15:34

Yeah, okay. I'm a product person at heart and I've had my company for 23 years. So we've been through a lot of evolutions, a lot of reinventions. and we're going through another one right now, which is hard and fun. Did you guys, from a product standpoint, have to rebuild from the ground up?

Did you reimagine everything that the product was and should be? Is that why it took a few years? And is that where you are?

Dan Zitting: 15:57

Yeah. It was you know, I think we did it with an intention of more expanding the product than reinventing it from the ground up. And while we were in the midst of that, there was also a little technology transformation that came along called large language models and the real takeoff of AI. The two things combined did motivate us to go all the way back to the drawing board. And, and in a lot of ways, rebuild the value of the platform from the ground up and based on sort of an AI-first mentality.

And that's really what we're rolling out now. So not only our, you know, not only our not only our historical and heritage products around risk, but all of our new products are AI forward and use the ability, use that capability to fundamentally change the breadth of insight we can find. But by the amount of just workflow and clicking that we can eliminate that did take, in effect, a full step backwards to get really back to where we wanted to be going.

Richard Walker: 17:13

Yeah, that's the hard part with the product, is that one step or two steps backwards to get where you want to be, because you're backing out of a maze that had a dead end, so to speak. But to build up, especially with AI first principles to build up properly. There's so much value in doing that. So, Dan, I'm curious about something. I mean, you guys are known for the risk number and being a risk questionnaire. What does AI do for that?

Dan Zitting: 17:38

Well yeah. So that's a great question. So off the bat. So, right off the bat, the first task that we took on to really shift was, hey, if the client's filled out a questionnaire, the obvious question is this is where they need to be or this is what they need to have. How do I compare that to where they are today and that has historically taken place? I need to create some kind of connection, have them log in, you know, have them do a login to their brokerage platform and connect it that way.

Or I needed to manually key in their statements for those sorts of things. AI has changed that to where, hey, if you can share a brokerage statement with us, we'll have your entire portfolio in, you know, in a matter of a couple of minutes so that we can compare where you are today. So that ability to ingest, ingest and automate the creation of portfolios from documents was a big part of where we started. And we said, now that we've done that, let's that was a big chunk of workflow and friction that we've eliminated. Where else can we go to do that?

And now we're in the process of transforming all of that. Will be excited to be announcing sort of agentic capabilities for the whole way along the chain. So, for example, at the far end of the spectrum in the future, does the client even necessarily need to take a risk questionnaire or fill out a form? Maybe. Instead, in our meetings tool, you just have a conversation with that client, leading them down the path of the discussion that needs to be had to assess the risk tolerance.

And bam, you have their risk number. So it's it's those kinds of things where AI can just do so much processing on behalf of us humans that we can take, you know, that we can take sort of the manual clicking out, or even more importantly, that we can do stuff in a more intimate setting where I'm guiding you by voice and using the power of me being an advisor to guide you through that conversation. The most effective way to get the risk number that's just right, as compared to the one you filled out on a form.

Richard Walker: 20:00

So look, I have this kind of weird interest, and maybe this is why I'm asking this type of question. I'm wondering when people are using AI to judge sentiment, judge underlying behaviors of people, like watching them facially or reading their transcripts and hearing tone or other things that, you know, just answering a survey doesn't necessarily provide. And I'm wondering, you guys are in the position to potentially do this. Is this something that's interesting to your firm?

Dan Zitting: 20:25

It's interesting to our firm in the sense of what we want, as long as we're making it a superpower. For the advisor, to be exceedingly clear is we don't think the computer does this well, at least not today. And I don't know if ever. But today. As powerful as AI and large language models are, I think we need to be careful about assuming, especially in a topic as complex as financial planning, that the computer on its own can do it with the client.

So we believe that we are a big lift to the top, to sort of the editing layer of the advisor to make sure and go, yep, that's what I heard. Yep. That's what I heard, actually, you know, what large language model you couldn't do was see the expression on their face when they said that. Here's a little bit of, you know, here's a little bit of a tweak to my notes there. So that's where we believe the power is.

So help the client get deeper or help the advisor through an automated way get deeper, more impactful sentiment analysis. But not that ever passes, you know, passes beyond them without their sort of review of the situation, if that makes sense.

Richard Walker: 21:44

No, it totally does. I met with I just at a social event. I met a radiologist, a doctor, radiologist who had his own practice, and had like a thousand people working for him. And my wife is also a nurse. And so she's in the medical field.

And there's a lot of people upset in radiology where AI can detect cancer and read charts better than anybody else can. And so I asked him, like, do you think AI is going to put these radiologists out of business? He's like, are you crazy? He's like, okay, so first of all, there's more people aging than ever before. So there's going to be more need for scans.

And if we make it cheaper, more people will get the scans and we'll solve problems up front and will help them earlier. And he said to do you think anybody wants to hear AI tell them they have cancer? You want a person to be there with you, right? And I think the same way. I mean, this whole idea of AI taking over what humans do best is never flying with me, but I'm so interested to see how far we're going to go.

Dan Zitting: 22:40

If it doesn't fly with me either. Not for a minute, with one caveat. And to me, the caveat is the radiologist won't use AI and is going to read the scan themselves. That to me is going to go away. And I think with financial advisors, it's you know, I don't know if it's quite that threatening because like you said, it's not exactly the same situation where the computer for sure does it better, like reading radiology scans.

But I do think it's a big parallel to say, the high-quality advisors are going to be the ones that can use these tools. But like you said, it means that more people can have an advisor, more people can be positively impacted by an advisor. And, you know, surely as we all get more productive in AI, if you're the optimist I am, AI lifts all boats. More people can afford a financial advisor and have wealth to manage. So I'm a big believer in the parallel between those situations.

Richard Walker: 23:44

Yeah. And I think everything is going to have a higher quality to it because there is absolutely so much.

Dan Zitting: 23:49

Yeah, absolutely.

Richard Walker: 23:51

Okay. So Dan, you may have already said it without me knowing this. I'm curious with all the new stuff that Nitrogen is doing, what are you most excited about? Like what product or feature gets you super excited and you can't wait for people to to play with?

Dan Zitting: 24:05

So there's a few things. One is I can't wait for people to feel the power of this agentic workflow. Just that I know that's super buzzwordy, but just that it will. The way I prepare to gather data for research and have an impactful client meeting is just so much easier and so much more powerful. I'm super excited about that.

But what I'm actually really, I'm probably even more excited for is we've just launched our tax product. And to see it is that point where to me, you know, the software begins to feel magical in the sense that all I have to do is hand-load my client's tax return. And not only do I immediately have ten new things to talk to the client about, that may not be tax advice, but are definitely tax education about where we should be taking our conversation and helping them be fearless about the under, you know, this person he or she understands is thinking about me from a tax perspective, and I'm thus less likely to get bitten is really impactful. But on the other side of it too, just the, you know, candidly, the insight for the advisor to say, I see dividends, rental property interest from things that I didn't know about. Are you sure?

Are you? Are you sure that I understand your full financial picture in the way that's going to optimize me being able to. Me being able to serve you?

Richard Walker: 25:43

So I'm kind of thinking about this for myself. I mean, I don't think most advisors want to take on the tax side because they're not CPAs. It's not their core business. And they'll say, go talk to your tax advisor to get perfect advice on this. And even if I try to get the two of them to talk, I feel like they really communicate and get the whole story.

So is this bridging that gap.

Dan Zitting: 26:02

That is 100% the intent is, you know, I'm exactly the same way. And, you know, candidly, my CPA has no business giving me financial advice. And frankly, I don't think they understand my financial future well enough to probably give me the best tax advice. And so unless I come prepared with a deep enough education on what I should talk to my CPA about. I'm probably going to get poor tax advice if I haven't prodded them in the right direction.

What this does is absolutely give you the education and insight that comes from a financial and a planning perspective to make sure, to make sure that I can. I almost hate to say it this way, but I can kind of corner my that I can corner my CPA into the right conversation that makes sure that they're really serving me, not just getting my tax return done. If I can put it that way.

Richard Walker: 27:00

Yeah. I want to ask a question more internal to Nitrogen, because I view you as a more mature, sophisticated company in our space than most fintechs, or most especially the startups out there. And in your role as CEO, even I'm wondering how much you lead product ideas and innovations, but how do you, as a company, come up with what you're going to do next, and figure out these innovations?

Dan Zitting: 27:24

Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's funny because like you alluded to for me, 17 years. 18 years now in software. And I originally got into it entrepreneurially which meant, like you, I was the product, you know, it was my ideas were what were what became the product. And I remember watching the company evolve over the years to where as we got bigger and more mature, there was always this debate inside the business about, well, I feel like we used to be an engineering-led company or a product led company, and we're becoming a sales led company.

And I fought that debate for years about, well, how is that right? And then I kind of came to me and it's like you realize, well, actually, we shouldn't be either of those things. We should be a customer-led company. We should be a market-led company. And I think what I've found in the last, I'd say in my last 5 or 6 years of doing this, really is how to build internal process, internal incentives in a way where it sort of forces us to be customer and market led, and we align our incentive or we we align our engineering and R&D strategy to that.

And then we align our, go-to-market motions, our sales, our compensation incentives, etc. to that. And so I hope that's where we are today. And that if you asked what our customers have seen at Nitrogen change over the last two years, what I authentically hope they would say the answer is, is that we feel like we're listened to and being taken in in a direction that is exciting to my business. Now, that doesn't mean that we necessarily say, give us your top ten list, and we work our way from number one down to down to ten because we are uniquely good. We think about product management and building software, just like our customers are uniquely good at being financial advisors, but it gives us a direction to pair with our excitement about technology and innovation to say, I hear you say X, we see Z going on with AI.

If we build Y, the market will. That will really change you know, that will really change the way people in our market can operate their business. And so that's the goal.

Richard Walker: 29:52

Yeah. No, I love that. It's really hard for customers to understand the balance that we have to choose in terms of what products we build, what features we have, etc. because there's only so many hours in a day and so many resources to deploy. And I share your sentiment about being customer led. I have had the same kind of debate about product leads because I'm a product person and I love coming up with new ideas, but I also love hearing it from the customers.

I get inspired more by customers than any other place. That gives me inspiration on ideas and frankly, our goal. My product owner said it to me yesterday or the day before. Our goal for 26 is to actually get me out of being the only person coming up with the main ideas, right? Because I talk to the customers the most, the whole company brings ideas to the table all the time, and we want to centralize that and say we are 100% customer led on how we decide on product ideas.

It's a big challenge.

Dan Zitting: 30:43

Yeah, we certainly use this analogy in the software business, but I think it's true about any business. Anytime you take on a new initiative or you act on a new idea, it's kind of like we've all business owners or business managers, we've got this backpack full of rocks that we're carrying around. And every time we act on a new idea, it's like you put a new rock in the backpack, right? And it's a lot easier to put new rocks in than take rocks out, so to speak. Yeah.

And having built a much larger software company in the past, what I found was some of the ideas that I was really excited about when we were 500 customers felt like small rocks, but once we were 15,000 customers, they were really big rocks. That turned out to be a really bad idea. And I think that making that makes that transition from being. And I do think it's important to be innovation led, but from being purely innovation led to saying, we're going to be creative, we're going to exercise our creativity, and then we're going to find cheap ways to validate and validate and disprove the stuff we're excited about with customers in the market, so that we don't put in rocks bigger than we need in our backpack. It is what I've found to be, if that analogy makes sense, helpful in trying to to exercise that.

Richard Walker: 32:06

Oh man, the first six, six, between 6 and 8 years of my company, we produced products because they were cool and fun, not because people would buy them. And I can't tell you how much time we wasted and how much we lost an opportunity by not having products people were willing to pay for.

Dan Zitting: 32:21

Hear, hear, my friend. Yeah.

Richard Walker: 32:25

Dan, this has been awesome and I have another question for you. But before I get to my last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?

Dan Zitting: 32:33

So I'm on both X and LinkedIn as Dan Zitting. You can find me there. My email is at Nitrogen Wealth com. Always happy to hear directly from the market. So happy to share my email there as well.

But the real place to learn about us is nitrogenwealth.com, where you'll find all about our products and our events and how to get a hold of all of our people. That can be even much more helpful than I can.

Richard Walker: 33:00

Awesome, I love it. It's good to have a team. All right, here comes one of my favorite questions. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

Dan Zitting: 33:10

It's really a really good question. And I think I think I may have to take that one, maybe in two parts, but surely the answer to that is I brought him up earlier. My father, my father, I grew up in a small town. My dad owned the little retail hardware store in town. I worked there growing up for something like eight years.

And there's no doubt that just the experience of working with the, you know, the experience you gain working with the public. I love anybody who's worked for McDonald's, was a waiter, waitress, worked in retail, those sorts of jobs when they were young. But my father was very much his. He got out on the floor. I put the floor in quotes, get on, on the floor.

That's where the customers are, as opposed to being in the back room, putting price tags on or upstairs, you know, planning out shelving or something like just get on the floor and sell was sort of his mantra. And I think that has helped lead me to being customer-centric and in my leadership, hopefully. But I would add to that too. You know, the other person I spent almost ten years building a company called Galvanize with a partner, a woman named Lori Schultz. And I, as opposed to putting her in the category of mentor, I think I like to think of her as a great partner to me.

Or for most of that time she was the CEO. I was chief product and strategy officer, so she was kind of the operations, finance discipline, how we build culture, and lead teams. And I was kind of the product customer guy. And it created a really healthy tension between sort of that idea of go kill for the customer, great innovation, but do it in a way where the business can succeed. And so maybe through good times and hard times working with Lori, I really learned a lot about how to have, I think, how to have a business, not how to have just a great product.

Richard Walker: 35:12

Yeah man that's great. I love that man. I hate to wrap this up. I've really enjoyed talking to you, but I want to give a big thank you to Dan Zitting, CEO of Nitrogen Wealth for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out their website at nitrogenwealth.com.

And don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com where we make processing forms easy. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channel for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Dan, thank you so much for joining me today.

Dan Zitting: 35:44

Rich. It was super fun and as a company, Quik! As I understand it, we use Net Promoter Score to manage to to measure customer happiness. And from what I understand, you may be the one company I know of that has a higher score than us. So it's fun to talk with somebody who cares about customers hopefully as much as we do.

Outro: 36:04

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